BBQ sauce/salad dressing line built on best in classFaced with rapid growth—driven by the popularity of its Sweet Baby Ray’s BBQ sauce—Ken’s Foods is adding new lines where needed. The Las Vegas plant has the latest.

By Pat Reynolds, VP/Editor

Seeing as Ken’s Foods produces the world’s most popular barbecue sauce, Sweet Baby Ray’s, it’s little wonder that new packaging lines for PET retail bottles are popping up with some frequency in the three plants that fly under the firm’s banner. One of the new lines, still on the drawing boards, will be installed at headquarters in Marlborough, MA. It should look a lot like the new line just installed at the firm’s Las Vegas plant. Operating now since December 2011, the Las Vegas line is notable primarily for its speed. It handles 18-oz PET bottles at 400/min. But it’s also quite versatile, accepting 28- and 40-oz bottles as well as being capable of filling salad dressings in 16 and 24-oz sizes.

This is the newest line in the Las Vegas plant. When it arrived, two others had to be relocated. As part of an overall expansion project, 65,000 sq ft of warehouse space was also added. Altogether, it was an $18 million project.

Exiting the rinser/filler/capper block, bottles make a right turn and pass through an Enercon induction sealer. Only squeezable bottles that have a diaphragm dispensing fitment require induction sealing; they don’t get the neck label that serves as a tamper-evidence device on all the other bottles, so the induction seal provides tamper evidence.